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Historical Theory

Historians grow worse at making generalizations the further they educate themselves. The same applies to any expert, of course. Some topics are harder to generalize than others about by their nature- often due to the fact that they’re already generalized topics.

Populist movements are one of those topics. Academic definitions tend to be muddled at best- read Wikipedia’s section on it to get an idea. Definitions of populism frequently try to associate it with particular segments on the political spectrum, which can’t help but muddling it further. For whatever reason, it’s usually: populism is only populism when it occurs on the left. I attribute that to it achieving some sort of positive buzzword status there. I’ve never seen anyone able to successfully explain why right-wing or fascist popular movements aren’t populist movements without extensive mental contortions, however. Even if we were to exclude right-wing or fascist movements from populism, we’d still be trying to fit an astonishing range of movements into one category. Arab Spring, the American Civil Rights Movement, the Boxer Rebellion, etc, etc. So let’s not exclude movements from populist status based off of their location on the political spectrum.

We could try to dismiss the term populist movement in favor of social movement to fix the definition problem, but social movement is a much, much more generalized one, which somewhat defeats the purpose of dismissing the term in the first place. Similar problems apply to most other terms. If we keep down that path, it takes us towards the realm of useless semantics.

We should stop for a second and actually talk about the definition of populism we’re going to use here.